Week 1 of the 2025 NFL season has come and gone following the Monday Night Football matchup between the Chicago Bears and Minnesota Vikings on Sept. 8. The entire league was in action in the opening week of the campaign.
There were bound to be some teams that put together underwhelming performances in their Week 1 contests with how many squads played. With that in mind, the Miami Dolphins, New England Patriots and Baltimore Ravens might just have been the three biggest disappointments to open the campaign. Let’s break down why that is.
3. New England Patriots
Ahead of the start of the new season, plenty of people pegged the Patriots to be one of the more improved teams in football compared to a season ago. New England now has a more experienced head coach in Mike Vrabel along with a retooled roster, headlined by the team’s offseason addition of wide receiver Stefon Diggs.
It’s certainly not too late for New England to go out and have a successful 2025 campaign and contend for a playoff spot, but the team got off to a rough start to its potential bounce-back campaign when it took on the Las Vegas Raiders on Sunday.
The Patriots lost to Las Vegas at Gillette Stadium by seven points, and their offense looked rough for three of the four quarters in the game. New England scored its only touchdown in the first quarter and ended the contest with a mere 13 points.
Diggs didn’t exactly light up the Raiders in his Patriots debut, either. He showed flashes of his elite skill set but ended up with just 57 receiving yards. For perspective, the four-time Pro Bowl selection averages 72.7 receiving yards per contest for his NFL career.
Meanwhile, the Patriots didn’t run the ball very well and were plagued by other lapses elsewhere, leading to a season-opening loss in a game that they were favored to win.
2. Baltimore Ravens
No team let go of the rope in its first game of the campaign quite like the Ravens did. By all accounts, Baltimore should have handily beaten the Buffalo Bills given the score after three periods, but a nightmarish fourth quarter led to its demise.
At the end of the third quarter, the Ravens were in total command. They held a decisive 34-19 lead over Buffalo, and Baltimore running back Derrick Henry was tearing up the Bills on the ground.
However, the Ravens then just scored six more points in the final quarter compared to the Bills’ 22 and lost by one.
Henry had a huge run in the fourth for his second score of the game but later had a costly fumble. Baltimore could have at least forced an overtime period if it hadn’t misfired on an extra point in the final frame. Perhaps the biggest issue was that the Ravens allowed the Bills to have four separate drives in the quarter that ended in points.
According to ESPN, the Ravens’ probability to come out on top was at 99.1 percent with just under five minutes remaining in the fourth. The Bills are also just the fourth team since the year 2000 to win after trailing by 15-plus points in the last four minutes of the fourth quarter.
The Ravens have now lost 8 games since the 2021 season in which they, at one point, had a win probability of at least 90%.
That's three more than the next closest team.
— Benjamin Solak (@BenjaminSolak) September 8, 2025
For the Ravens, the loss continues an infuriating trend of the team building major leads only to lose. They make the list as one of the most disappointing teams of Week 1 because they evidently haven’t fixed that flaw even after all these years.
1. Miami Dolphins
The Dolphins were the clear-cut most disappointing team in all of football in Week 1. The team suffered the biggest margin of defeat of any of the 32 squads that played (25 points), leaving very little room for optimism moving forward.
In Miami’s 33-8 loss to the Indianapolis Colts, it was equally ineffective on both sides of the ball. Offensively, star players such as quarterback Tua Tagovailoa and wide receiver Tyreek Hill didn’t look at the top of their games, to put it mildly. Tagovailoa threw more interceptions than touchdowns, while Hill had just 40 receiving yards in the first game of his fourth season as a Dolphin.
Miami finished with just 211 yards of offense against Indianapolis, marking its fewest in a game since Mike McDaniel was hired to be the Dolphins’ head coach earlier this decade.
Defensively, the Dolphins’ thin secondary got carved up by Colts signal-caller Daniel Jones, who looked great in his Indianapolis debut and threw for 272 yards while completing all but seven of his 29 passes.
It’s hard to imagine Miami could have possibly gotten off to a worse start to the 2025 season, and it should be worth following how the team responds in its Week 2 contest against the Patriots with noise already beginning about the job security of some top Dolphins figures.
